How is the world’s best coffee produced?

Follow Business Insider’s reporter to a farm in Costa Rica – one of the places that produces the best coffee in the world.

This is the mountain road leading to the Monteverde coffee plantation in Costa Rica.

Monteverde is about a 3-hour drive from Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose. The humid climate here is ideal for growing coffee.

The majority of coffee grown in Monteverde is Coffea arabica, which accounts for about 75% of the world’s coffee production. Here is a view of a corner of the farm, where coffee is interspersed with corn and other crops to enhance the soil’s nutrient cycling.

Coffea arabica was first grown in the forests of the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia. Today, the plant is found all over the world, from Africa and South America to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. Here are small seeds that farmers have planted to study the plant’s growth.

Because nearly all the coffee we drink today comes from a single wild plant in Ethiopia, it is genetically poor and therefore vulnerable to climate change.

Rising temperatures are causing coffee borers to thrive, and creating a favorable environment for coffee-destroying fungi to thrive. According to a recent report by the Australian Climate Institute, coffee plants will be extinct by 2080.

When ripe, coffee berries turn from green to yellow, red, purple.

After picking, the coffee cherries are washed, dried, and roasted using one of three methods: dry, semi-dry, and wet. Dry roasting involves cleaning and drying the entire coffee cherry without separating the beans inside. Wet roasting involves separating the beans, then cleaning and drying them immediately. Pictured is coffee roasted using the semi-dry method.

Semi-dry roasting involves splitting the coffee cherry to reveal the beans, which are covered in a sweet sticky coating (as shown below). Semi-dry roasting is also known as the “honey method” because the beans are still moist and sticky, like honey.

After the beans are split, the moist coffee beans are placed in a barrel and kept for about 2 weeks. Although this method is used, the beans are usually kept for 6 months and then dry roasted to enhance the flavor. Pictured are the cleaned and dried coffee beans.

After roasting, the coffee is packaged whole or ground and packaged.

Pictured is French press coffee. The coffee is pressed and rinsed with hot water for about 5 – 10 minutes.

Fragrant coffee, sweet flavor and unforgettable sour taste on the tip of the tongue after enjoying.

The coffee harvested here is sold to many manufacturers and packaged under many different brands. However, some is also packaged and sold to tourists under the brand name Life Monteverde.